War Times Review

Date: 7/19/2005

World War II has been used extensively as a setting for action games. In
fact, many of the top games in the genre are set during WWII. However, WWII
real-time strategy games have been a lot fewer and far between. What's more,
most of these games have not been very good. It could be that the conflict does
not make a good setting for RTS games. Or it could be that the developers of
these games aren't really trying, instead relying on the setting to carry a weak
strategy game. This latter point seems to be the case with War Times, which is
yet another sub-par strategy game that is merely cloaked in a WW2 wrapper.

A base comes under attack.

War Times is based on the basic RTS model. You have two types of resources,
oil and ore, which must be collected by workers. These resources can then in
turn be spent to purchase buildings, units, and upgrades. Winning missions
almost invariably means building up a base, amassing a large army, and then
steamrolling the enemy under the weight of your units. This in and of
itself is not a knock against War Times. In the past World War II strategy
games have tried to stay closer to WWII strategy gaming's war game roots than to
RTS games set in futuristic or fantasy worlds. However, an exciting RTS
game which featured WWII units would certainly find its way into a lot of
strategy gamers' collections. Unfortunately though, War Times is not that
game. The inclusion of the basic RTS elements in this case smacks more of
laziness in game design than a clever attempt to merge two of strategy gaming's
sub-genres.

War Times let's you play as one of the four major combatants in the war's
European Theater, the US, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany.
The Soviet Union and Germany are for players who like armor, the US has the
strongest air units, and Great Britain fields a balanced force. There are
two campaigns in the game, one Allied and one Axis, in which the missions are
set during some of the famous battles of the war. The missions are not
really recreations of these battles, but rather traditional RTS scenarios named
after the battles. For example, in Dunkirk you need to build a base and
produce troops to hold off German attacks until you can move the required number
of units off of the map. The invasion of Poland is the even more
basic "lead a group of units through a maze-like map" scenario. The
majority of the other battles involve building a base and putting together a
large enough force to crush the enemy with sheer numbers.

The primary problem with the game is not it's lack of imagination in applying
the RTS model to a WWII environment, it's simply that every facet of the game is
not very well implemented. Let's start with the game's pacing - it is
slow, at times painfully so. Structures take a long time to build and the
linear nature of the building tree means that you'll have to wait a long time
until the important buildings are even available. Units also take a long
time to create, and when you couple this with the long time it takes to even get
to the point where you can start building you get an exercise in waiting.
The designers may have been aware of this problem, but rather than fix the deign
they provided an option to speed the game time. This will make the waiting
a little less painful, but unfortunately it speeds everything else up as well.
Trying to keep a handle on your units at four times normal speed can be rather
difficult considering the game's poor pathfinding.